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Trumped

There was a time when the name “Trump SoHo” would have sounded like an oxymoron or a punch line. That time has passed. A 46-story, $3,000-a-square-foot condo-hotel with that very name is climbing into the skyline from a section of Manhattan once considered so hopeless that it might as well be razed to accommodate an expressway. Of course, some people still won’t accept the idea — like the neighborhood residents and preservationists who recently converged outside a promotional party for the project, waving signs scrawled with slogans like “Earth to Trump: Get Out of SoHo Now!” Donald Trump thanked them for the free publicity and claimed that although the building won’t open until 2009, there are already 3,200 purchase applications for its 400 units.

The building is backed by a partnership among the Trump Organization, the Bayrock Group and the Sapir Organization, but there was little question whose name would be slapped on the property. Trump’s company actually sells the right to use his name on dozens of luxury condos around the world, and, according to Forbes magazine, charges 8 to 15 percent of gross sales (meaning Trump is making money even if the licensee isn’t). Forbes calls the licensing business “the most valuable piece of the Trump empire by far.”

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Illustration by Leif Parsons

Bayrock’s executive vice president, Julius Schwarz, says Trump SoHo is a partnership deal, not a licensing one. But the bottom line is that the word “Trump” adds to the bottom line. “Trump’s name brings the highest premium,” says Alex Sapir, president of the Sapir Organization. “I don’t think there’s any other household real estate name.” True enough, but what does that name mean in the households of downtown Manhattan? “I don’t know if it would have worked 10 years ago,” Sapir says. But downtown, he adds, “has changed incredibly.”

Indeed, SoHo in 2007 is far removed from its days as a haven for artists, which is what made the neighborhood famous. Paper magazine, the longtime chronicler of downtown culture that was started in SoHo in 1984, just last year moved its offices from nearby TriBeCa to 32nd Street, says Kim Hastreiter, one of its founders. “We couldn’t afford it anymore,” she says. As it happens, Hastreiter, not long out of art school, was among those who, in the 1970s, took advantage of a city-backed plan that gave artists special tax deals to move into the sketchy stretch of neglected former factories. That was back when The New York Times still needed to explain that “SoHo” wasn’t a reference to the London neighborhood but a shortening of a city-planning designation for the area, South Houston Industrial District. By then the expressway scheme had faded; uptown art dealers and historic-district designation followed. And New York being New York, so did disillusion. One skeptic sneered to The Times that the area was becoming “a completely fake Bohemia, filled with dead ideas and dead art” and galleries that may as well “sell by mail order to Wichita.” This was in 1975.

Hastreiter is more generous. Even today a “downtown of the mind” persists, she says, although she’s referring more to a mind-set or an attitude than any particular place. She figures that SoHo, as a patch of geography where that mind-set flourished, “started to die like 15 years ago.” Now synonymous with pricey shopping, high-end dining, wildly expensive living spaces and posh hotels, the word SoHo means about what the word Trump means: money. “You have to be rich” to live in contemporary SoHo, Hastreiter observes. “Probably more rich than you have to be to live on the Upper East Side.”

And that’s the point. Sapir himself maintains that SoHo and TriBeCa are among the most expensive neighborhoods in New York. But, of course, he and his partners see this as a sign of vitality, not death. To them, the project is about the downtowning of Trump, with key roles played by the “next generation” — Ivanka and Donald Jr. — in various design and décor decisions. Sapir (who is 27) seems to choose his words carefully when he says this Trump property will be “a little less exaggerative,” using materials that are “rich” but “don’t scream.” Presumably this means less emphasis on the color gold. “It’s for everybody who loves to enjoy life, who enjoys the finer things,” Sapir offers. “It’s fun. There’s been five-star in New York, but there’s never been five-star fun, five-star cool.” After all, he says, “this is SoHo.” And so it is.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 638 of the New York edition with the headline: Trumped. Today's Paper|Subscribe